


No Signal

by Riona



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Sacrifice Arcadia Bay Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-06 01:43:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13400805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riona/pseuds/Riona
Summary: With the wreckage of a town behind them and an empty road ahead, there are a lot of conversations that Max and Chloe need to have. But it's hard to talk about these things.





	No Signal

“San Fran’s coming up,” Chloe says. “You want to stop and eat something?”

“We’re going south,” Max says, suddenly. It’s the first time she’s spoken in a while, and her voice feels a little rusty.

“We’ve been heading south, like, this whole time,” Chloe says. “Since yesterday. You’ve only just noticed?”

Max stares out the window, at scorched grass and scrubby trees, at wires stretched between transmission towers, at the wide, flat, endless expanse of road cutting through the middle of it all. She guesses on some level she was _aware_ that they’d reached California, but it’s not really what she’s been thinking about. “I guess.”

“Would’ve run out of states if we’d gone north,” Chloe says.

Or west, Max thinks, to die choking on water just like every person in Arcadia Bay. But something about travelling south is still bothering her, and it’s a moment before she remembers where Chloe and Rachel were planning to run to.

“Are we going to Los Angeles?” she asks.

Chloe is silent for a long, long moment.

“No,” she says, and she pulls them onto the next road heading east.

-

It’s weird how much silence there is between them now. Max told Chloe _everything_ during that strange, intense week in Arcadia Bay. She told her things she could never imagine telling anyone else. And now they can drive for hours without saying a word to each other.

The stupidest part is that Max knows they must be thinking about the same thing. They’ve been avoiding the news, but she’s seen Chloe tense up in those moments when the news finds them: hearing the words _the destruction of Arcadia Bay_ from televisions in cafés or diners, seeing the storm photographs on the front pages of newspapers. It’s a jolt, every time. And every time Max thinks that maybe this is it, maybe this is the moment they have an actual conversation about this.

And somehow she always finds herself pretending she didn’t notice, and the moment goes by.

No matter how close you are to someone, maybe there are things that just can’t be said.

-

She’s just coming back to consciousness, dim and hazy, and – there’s someone here, she can hear breathing, she can feel someone _right next to her_ —

She lashes out and hears someone swear, but it’s not his voice, it’s—

“Chloe?”

“ _Jesus_ , Max.”

Her chest is tight and her heart is beating too fast and she can still feel those gloved fingers on her skin. “Sorry. I – are you okay?”

“I’ll live, for once,” Chloe mutters. “What the hell was that?”

Max draws her knees up to her chest. Stares at the motel curtains, the artificial light of the parking lot coming through the crack between them.

“I had a nightmare,” she says. It seems like the easiest answer.

-

Chloe books separate beds for them at the next motel. Max thinks about saying something. _No, it’s okay,_ or _maybe we should talk about this first._

But she’s not sure it _is_ okay. She can’t wake up like that again, thinking she’s back there, thinking he still has her. And she wants Chloe to know it’s nothing to do with her, but she’s not ready to go into detail about her time in the Dark Room.

She stays quiet.

-

Max tries to open the conversation about Arcadia Bay once. They’re in Wyoming, taking a break from driving, standing in front of some weird Abraham Lincoln monument. Lincoln’s head glares disapprovingly at them from the top of a big slab of rock, like Mount Rushmore had a creepy baby.

When Max manages to tear her eyes from Lincoln’s, she sees that Chloe is looking at her phone. At a photo of her mom.

The lighting’s unflattering; it’s not a great photograph. Maybe Chloe doesn’t have that many pictures of her mom. Max forgets, sometimes, that other people aren’t as into photography as she is, aren’t as careful about documenting the moments that mean something.

Chloe catches her looking, swears quietly, shuts off her phone screen. And there’s that weird tension again, that moment when Max feels like she’s standing at the edge of a rooftop, wondering whether she’s about to take that step, wondering whether she’s about to say something.

(She dreamt about Kate again last night. Even if she’d been able to save her, she guesses it wouldn’t have made much difference when the storm hit. Somehow that doesn’t make it any easier.)

She has to say something. She doesn’t want to, but this silence is killing her.

“We could go back,” Max says. _Please say no,_ she’s thinking. “See if anyone made it out okay.”

Like Joyce? Like Warren? The diner was flattened. Maybe the same explosion Max prevented in the other timeline.

Chloe shakes her head. “It was a shitbag town full of shitbag people. The world’s better off with it wiped off the map.”

She lights a cigarette. Max can see her hands trembling. She must have bought the packet with the money they looted from corpses and destroyed stores, just like the gasoline, just like the motel stays, just like everything else they’ve been paying for on this trip.

Does Chloe ever think about how Max killed all those people? About how Chloe begged Max to sacrifice her with tears in her eyes, and Max made the decision to let them all die instead? Or does Chloe think it’s her own fault?

It’s something they should probably talk about at some point.

Just another thing to add to the pile.

-

Max’s phone didn’t survive the night of the storm; it was soaked through. It’s not a top priority – who is she going to talk to? – but she eventually gets another handset, transfers her SIM card into it.

The messages start coming through, in the tens, in the hundreds, and that’s when she realises her parents must think she’s dead.

She stares at the screen, her finger hovering over the call button.

She should call them.

She’ll call them. Just as soon as she’s figured out what to say.

-

They’re passing through a forest in Pennsylvania, less than a day’s drive from New York. When they get there, are they going to stop, find a place to stay? Or are they just going to find a new place to drive to? If they just keep moving, maybe all the ghosts on their tail won’t be able to catch up.

“I guess we paid off my cosmic debt, at least,” Chloe says.

There’s nothing leading up to it, and it takes Max a moment to catch what she means. “It’s not yours. It’s mine. You didn’t ask me to save you.”

“Whatever. Point is, it’s gone. Right? I mean, I haven’t died in, what, two weeks?”

Max thinks about telling her. All the rewinds, all the nosebleeds she’s been trying to hide. Car accidents, muggings gone wrong, Chloe bleeding out on the road or in her arms, Chloe falling from high places, dying and dying and dying.

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s gone.”


End file.
